ITC Committee Meeting February 17, 2017 Small Group Discussion Discussion Questions What should be the role of ITC in this task (recommendations related to analysis of IT service inventory data)? What are the advantages and disadvantages of the options presented for ITC involvement? Is there another way you feel might work better?
ITC Notes, 2/17/2017 Small Group Discussion The group was talking about a combination of a couple of the paths or options wherein as a problem surfaces, say for example a policy isn t clear enough or we need a new policy or whatever, the idea was that the role of the ITC would be to receive that request and to discern how that policy should be addressed. Whether or not it should be addressed. And then carry that forward into at least to be sensitive to and listening to the folks who would have to implement that policy so that nothing lost in discerning exactly what should be addressed and then having ITC work with others, another appropriate TAG team for example that seems to have that policy topic more in their area. To say that this is something that we feel that you should work on. We would like you to do that on behalf of ITC. We were kind of talking in this hybrid way that we were guessing that particularly for the faculty on ITC that getting too shoulder-to-shoulder all the way through the process would make it too hard to recruit. But reserving that right. There are parts of diagnosis they might want to be involved in or ITC in general and parts of the implementation, but by and large you have functional experts dealing with different pieces and the heart of the work of ITC is in that policy development area with setting the guiding principles. The guiding principles really resonated with this table here. So the corners of the smile would mean that ITC would be working more closely with the folks who have defined the
problem or who seem to recognize that there is a problem whether it is with policy or practice or a service or something as well as spilling over into the implementation. So it is not just crafting a policy and throwing it over the fence into implementation and then they would have to figure out how it would have to work. I ll add that from my perspective this is a shared governance committee which means it is part of faculty governance. The primary role of this committee is to represent that POV and not to meddle too much in these other areas. Just as much as necessary. One of the main functions of this group could be to make sure that these solutions were implemented according to the guidelines that were given. So some type of accountability measure for the implementers. We talked about a lot of things. The gneeral theme was treating the ITC as the board of directors. With that there are some common requirements the fiduciary duty on IT spend of campus, the strategy planning approval on what our priorirites are and how that aligns with campus needs specifically, and then policies. High level policy that would need to escalate into a larger scale conversation. ITC needs to own that in conjunction with the ITSC. So the ITSC plays the role of helping to validate some components that come up through that process. Can this actually be done on campus? What would it actually take to get those things done? And then own the execution. So when something is finally approved for the ITC
then it goes to the ITSC to really execute that policy decision and operation. It would integrate with the TAG groups as the advisory group to help shape that conversation. So if something initiates at the ITC it would actually go down to a TAG group or to a working group. It is possible that ITC would initiate different working groups if needed. But the TAG would then implement some kind of conversation aroudn that to support the conversation that needs then get approved at the ITC level. One thing we did talk about is that we want to obviously still encourge and support some of that agility that does happen with the innovation that we do. At what point does something have to bubble up to the ITC level? Don t want to burden with all the minutia, but at the same time when something does reach a certain scale that reaches a tipping point that does get to the ITC conversation level. The more formal governance process. ITC might be able to play a path finding role for things that come out from grassroots efforts and what path those initiatives might need to take through the governance body. For example, if it is something with T&L maybe it doesn t hve to go to RTAG. So what should the path be? Choosing between the three models outlined, we talked about how university committees operate. Some issues bubble up and they deal with them directly. There are other issues where they farm them out to a committee. There are other issues where there are committees who have joint membership. So
what we saw was sort of the issues that come to the ITC are either if they are major issues and they are major policy then probably some of the ITC as a body should be dealing with. If there is a dedicated group already dealing with it, then it should potentially go to that dedicated group unless it is such a big issue that the entire ITC should be dealing with it. Again, depending on what the matter is or what the subgroups are, you might choose to have an ITC member on that group so there is a constant flow of information. The one thing that we talked about a little bit was the issue of members of our community are trying to decide how they should seek services or seek help. This is a very heterogeneous campus. Different units deal with IT in different ways. But potentially one of things that is important is that it is clear that the ITC is open to being contacted and quite possibly someone calls for example one of us to share an issue. The answer is I don t know, I ll ask Rafi. He might say that is a really important thing. The ITC should be involved. Or he might say you know, T&L has been working on that for the past few months. They are going to be reporting out soon. So a little bit of a board of directors but also a little bit of dealing with...some things are passed on and some are dealt with directly. And there is it is probably more a matter of having some guidelines for operating principles than a strict thing that says that this issue always goes to this committee. Perhaps some triage system? People know they can bring things here, but we hav some way of intaking them. Not everything makes it onto the agenda.
I think that everyone on the campus knows about DoIT, but they don t know about this group necessarily. So we spent a lot of time and had similar questions and discussion as the previous table. We spent time looking at the charter of the steering committee. What is their role? I am a very visual person so I need a more 3D representation of that block diagram to tell how we relate to the other group (ITSC). With two university staff representatives at this table, the TAG groups, this is the group that we have representation on. More recently there has been an effort to schedule a meeting between the central committee of unversity staff and Mike Lehman to figure out how do we get out voices heard and where else we fit in that bubble and it relates to well, maybe it is a working group or maybe some other subject matter area where there is expertise. A lot of the discussion had to do with how we better represent the existing bubble structure and use those graphics to better define the process and who deals with what. It may not be exclusive. I was starting to build on an observation from two other large organizations I ve been part of. One was SAP in Germany 20,000 employees (unemployed physicists who tend to be very creative). The org development group with leadership would throw out here is the issue. Five different teams would work on the issue there would be a showcase with very short turnaround. Everyone would take what was working. Distributed bottom-up decision-making. Decentralized history. The other example was DOA with PeopleSoft. There was just one that all the agency IT directors
met monthly organized by journalists. The threshold was that all projects that met a certain dollar amount or touched a certain number of people had to go through that one group or decision-making body. Nothing happened. We are in this movement toward the middle. Just an observation of where we fit with all the changes. Model 1 was unworkable alone. We are probably looking at some hybrid between Model 2 and 3 depending on the issue. I would reinforce what the other groups have said as chair of one of the advisory boards. Certainly this recent exercise in policy when Bob Turner was here showed that when you farm this out to a number of groups you get caught in an infinite loop. The feedback comes and you have to bounce it back and so on. The ITSC needs to serve as a board of directors and say that this is an issue that we are going to assign to this group as an issue. That might be the ITC if it is a policy issue. We need you folks to take the lead on this. Or if it is an infrastructure issue we need to you to take the lead on this. That may spin up a working group that is representative of all the other groups, butit is really an agility or a workload issue. I don t need to tell any of you how busy you are. In all of these groups we tend to see the same faces over and over again. So you can t have multiple committees and keep sending these things back and forth.
It is interesting that the other group said that ITC should be the board of directors and you are saying that ITSC should be the board of directors. That relationship is one that we should consider in a future meeting to resolve what the relationship is between the ITC and the ITSC. It is very important. It is currently very undefined and fuzzy. The idea is that they will supplement and augment one another.